A case study on co-evolution of software artifacts using integrated views

Abstract

When changing software systems, significant effort is spent on locating the architectural elements to be changed, how they relate to the existing and new requirements, and what decisions have led to the current state of the parts of the system to evolve. Model-based approaches have proposed formal metamodels to capture different aspects of the system, e.g. requirements specified in use cases and architectural models for the component design. Existing approaches still lack in an easy-to-use way to combine information from different models. We carried out a case study evolving the CoCoME software observing what are major points for improvement. In this paper, we discuss the results of the case study giving a list of requirements for tools or approaches supporting architecture-centric and model-based software evolution. Finally, we present our graph-based approach for integrated views which can help in overcoming some of the current limitations.